Belarus U21

Minsk has hosted the national side's development team since the collapse of Soviet football, when players who had come through the USSR U21 system, and briefly a CIS U21 side, needed a shirt of their own. That first match came on 30 August 1992, a 1–0 win away to Moldova in Chișinău, and the team has carried the senior side's colours, red at home and light blue away, ever since.

The team has never settled on one ground. It used Dinamo Stadium in Minsk after its renovation brought capacity to 22,000, then moved into the newly opened National Football Stadium in 2025. Since 2022, UEFA sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine have kept it from playing home qualifiers on Belarusian soil altogether, and its "home" games have gone on in Georgia, Armenia and Hungary instead.

Three appearances at the UEFA European Under-21 Championship finals, in 2004, 2009 and 2011, tell only part of the story; the 2011 tournament in Denmark is the one worth telling. Under Georgy Kondratyev, Belarus lost 1–3 to Spain in the semi-final, then beat the Czech Republic 1–0 in the third-place match for a bronze medal that remains the team's best result. That finish carried them to the 2012 Olympics in London, where a 1–0 win over New Zealand was not enough to escape a group with Brazil and Egypt, and they finished third under Yuri Shukanov.

Aleksandr Hleb passed through this side before Arsenal, Barcelona and Stuttgart came calling and he went on to win 80 caps for the senior team. Matches against Russia U21, frequent opponents in the CIS Cup, and against Lithuania U21 have supplied most of the team's sharper occasions, without either developing into a named derby. It is still a team without a home ground of its own, built from what the old Soviet setup left behind in 1992.